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by jujubiest



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Post-Canon, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 07:07:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17893832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: Thorin survived the wounds of his body, but fears the wounds of his heart and mind would lead his people to ruin. So he makes a difficult decision: to leave his home's beloved halls, to say goodbye to all he's known. To go in search of something else, another place to call his home.





	Home

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a thing I wrote ages ago, at the height of my Bagginshield phase. It was basically a what-if. What if Thorin lived, but decided to abdicate? What if Bilbo didn't know, and left? What, if anything, would make Thorin Oakenshield leave the home and people he fought so hard for? This was my attempt at some sort of answer.

Thorin Oakenshield is a dwarf who deeply feels the responsibility to his people. He is honorable, and true, and noble, and good.

He is also tired. Tired, and heartsick, and all too aware that he cannot lead his people effectively, not so long as he stays beneath that mountain, within reach of the light reflected off dragon-cursed gold. Not while he fights tooth and nail for every moment of lucidity.

But that mountain is his people’s rightful home, and if that home has been made untenable to him, it means the crown must go to someone else. He would rather that than push his people away from their home once more.

His sister-son will rule well in his stead, and though it aches to think of leaving him, Thorin knows it must be done. Hubris is not one of his sins.

So he goes, quietly and to the echoing sound of his people’s mournful songs. He goes in the stillness and darkness of night, between watches, slips through the cool, sturdy caves, through passages he memorized as a child, retracing the intricate patterns carved into the walls again for the last time.

These are the things he loves about his people, the things they carved into their home: their enduring love of beauty, of artistry, of the ways in which even the plainest and crudest of stones might be hewn into manifestations of grace.

The dwarves took that love, that skill, and made it their mark on everything they held dear: the proof and permanence of their place in the world, no matter how often they were chased from it, no matter how far they had to wander.

Thorin’s fingers linger on the smooth stone for a moment at the door, reluctant to say goodbye. But say goodbye he finally must.

He meets a boat at the edge of the lake before the first light of dawn has begun to leech the riches of midnight-covered velvet and diamond stars from the sky. He slips quietly away on the lake, past the town, and meets an old grey wizard and a sharp-eyed eagle by the edge of the forest.

Gandalf’s eyes are dark with their disapproval of this plan of his, but Thorin assures him in a weary voice that this is what he wants, what he needs, and more importantly...what the dwarves of Erebor need, to heal the countless wounds left on their home, their history.

Gandalf concedes, though Thorin knows his disapproval has abated not at all, and they leave the chill night behind at last.

He is to rest, first, at least until the worst of his wounds are fully healed. The notion of such a long wait grates on him, but it’s necessary if he is to survive the journey. The wounds may not have killed him outright, but it was a very near thing. They could yet, if not tended properly.

The eagles have agreed to take him much of the way, a great last favor to the once-king under the mountain: an expression of their condolences for what he has to do.

They understand each other, dwarves and eagles, despite the fact that one’s province is earth and the other’s air. They have not quite the endless longevity of Elves, and not nearly the brief, tragic lifespan of Men. They live long but die, and leave few to replace and recall them. They guard their secrets and their kin, and shy from prying eyes. Their families, their lines, these are their history and legacy. These are their mark upon the world. To be apart from these is a pain that does not lessen with time, one rarely experienced by Elves and more easily healed in Men.

And what of the halfling, Thorin wonders through his painfully slow recovery, through those long wind-burned days of flight and increasingly warm and balmy nights which come after. He knows little of hobbits, for all that he spent so much time in one’s company. Do they cling to one another so hard in the Shire? Do they hold their ancestors sacred, their histories as treasures? Do they plant them in their hearts as they plant seeds in the ground, nurture them so that they grow deep roots which can never be torn out without leaving deep, ugly, never-healing scars?

Or does their love of the land give them something more lasting to cling to? Does the importance they place on hearth and home come from something warmer than duty, something softer than pride and gentler than the shared pain of exile? Do their bright, easy days make them free? Do they soften the blows of death, of loss?

He thinks of the break in Bilbo’s voice, the tears streaked down his dirty face, the way he’d curled up on the unforgiving ice and refused to move until someone, any friend, came to take Thorin away.

He thinks of this, and wonders if he’s wrong about hobbits, and doesn’t know what he should hope for. The time since he left his mountain seems to stretch behind him for years and years, but the time ahead seems without an end, and he begins to fear that by the time he arrives, there will be no place for him.

If there ever was at all.

At long last, he finds himself waving a final farewell to the last of the eagles, standing at the edge of a forest where the sunlight seems to have melted into every leaf and stone, leaving everything vibrant and lovely even in the shadows of a cold, nearly-moonless night. He thinks of what the trees would look like in the sunlight: warm trunks the color of new-turned earth, he imagines, with leaves that seemed to be gilded with gold.

This is a gold he can smile at softly, and feel no darkness, no mad yearning. There is something else pulling at him now, and it’s that which keeps him moving even through the night, through rolling fields of lush green grass in the pre-dawn, over hill and dale and up a narrow, winding path, only stopping at last when he sees it: a little round door set into the side of a hill, painted a brilliant green, the ghost of old runes still just visible beneath.

And here, at last, Thorin hesitates, unsure for the first time what his welcome will be...if he will be welcome at all. He is not a coward, has never been...but in this his courage does fail him, and he turns aside before his fist can be made to raise itself and knock.

Though when he does, his eye catches on a little tree, barely a sapling, reaching toward the rising sun with all its might. Under it is a stone, hewn smooth for sitting, and around it are little clusters of tiny yellow blossoms, poking up out of the ground in dense clusters and filling the early morning air with their sharp, herby perfume.

Thorin feels his sleepness night for the first time, and wants nothing more than to lie down amongst the flowers and sleep until the sun peeks over the hill behind him.

So that’s what he does, and that’s where poor Hamfast Gamgee finds him, much to his shock, several hours later.

Thorin wakes, squinting, to a fully-risen sun and the sound of someone banging hard on a wooden door. He sits up, groaning at all the places that will never fully stop feeling the ache of his dead foe’s blade, and turns toward the commotion to see Bilbo’s gobsmacked face, eyes round as saucers and looking at him as though he were a ghost or some fell fiend from the dark forest.

Then, all at once, that face crumples and tears spill over Bilbo’s cheeks as he pushes poor Hamfast aside--most rudely, he will certainly have to apologize later--in his haste to close the distance between himself and the dwarf who has never looked more wonderful or less like a king, with rumpled clothes and flowers and blades of grass caught in his hair and beard.

And as Bilbo pulls him to his feet with a surprising strength and wraps him up in an embrace so tight it nearly hurts, all Thorin can do is hold on and let tears of his own fall. He is welcome after all.

He is finally home.


End file.
